Gerard Maas Images

This is a ’see it to believe it’ kind of post. After the war of the pixels, the digital SLR Titans Canon and Nikon went on to the war of the ISO and the EOS 5D MKII is the Canon answer to the Nikon D3 field advance.
With an EOS 5D MKII in my hands, I had to test this high ISO feature in something else than the ubiquitous gray wall picture. I though of the night pavilion of our local zoo as the best place for such a field test. The pavilion is dedicated to the night crawlers from the nature and light levels are accordingly VERY low.

I’m truly impressed with the image results. On the original 5D, I didn’t go above ISO 400 unless I was really pressed to, and being a flash junkie that was not really often. But with this level of performance ISO 400 is the new ISO100. That’s very practical for extending the range of my speedlites as well… but that’s something to explore in the MKII version of this post.

While image performance is great, at this extremely low light levels AF becomes nearly impossible. Even manual focusing was difficult as there was almost no contrast between the subjects and the dark background. Sometimes I just had to guesstimate the focus point and hope for the best.

Here are some images comparing the high-end of the ISO range. This guy, an Indian Flying Fox, kind of scared me. Luckily it was behind glass. I hope I don’t see it banging at my window at night…